Page:The Novels of Ivan Turgenev (volume VI).djvu/228

Rh anywhere now; the very smell in it's antique; the people antique, the atmosphere antique take it how you will, it's all antique, Catherine the Second, powder, hoops, eighteenth century! Just fancy a husband and wife, both very old, the same age, and without a wrinkle; round, chubby, spruce little things, a perfect pair of little poll-parrots; and good-natured to stupidity, to saintliness, no bounds to it! They tell me "boundless" good-nature often goes with an absence of moral feeling. But I can't enter into such subtleties; I only know that my little old dears are the very soul of good-nature! Never had any children. The blessed innocents! That's what they call them in the town: blessed innocents. Both dressed alike in sort of striped gowns, and such good stuff: you can never see anything like that either nowadays. They're awfully like each other, only one has a mob-cap on her head, and the other a skull-cap, though that has the same sort of frilling as the mob-cap, only no strings. If it weren't for that difference, you wouldn't know which was which; especially as the husband has no beard. Their names are Fomushka and Fimushka. I tell you people ought to pay at the door to look at them, as curiosities. They love one another in the most impossible way; but if any one comes to visit